Incorporating Facilitated Advocacy into Uwezo Citizen-led Assessment of Child Learning in Uganda

• In Event: Citizen and community involvement

Proposal

Are Our Children Learning?

Uwezo - Capability in Swahili - is an education initiative of the East African NGO Twaweza (We Can). It aims to improve competencies in literacy and numeracy among children aged 6-16 years in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, by using an innovative approach to social change that is citizen driven and publicly accountable. Partnering with locally-recruited volunteers working in their home villages, Uwezo carries out country-wide assessments of child learning outcomes at household level, with one product being a village report card for each of the assessed communities. Although Uwezo data are not generalizable from village level, these reports are used to inform volunteer-facilitated village meetings whose purpose is to start a conversation involving community members (e.g., parents of the assessed children, teachers in the surveyed schools, and local and religious leaders) on what could be done to improve children's learning. Although these meetings have been mostly successful in the past, Uwezo is embracing a facilitated advocacy approach to enhance this process.

Making It Easier to Take Action

Facilitated advocacy is an approach to development initiatives that enables people to engage with each other equitably and to identify desired changes in policy and practice. The approach's purpose is for people to advocate for actions to improve their lives. Developed over several years in Asia and Africa, the facilitated advocacy approach grew out of experiences of listening to the voices of people in change processes that place the so-called target group at the center of development efforts, and that support them to advocate for what they value (Haylor and Savage, 2019). Tested, practical, community-based examples from seven other countries provided a justification for considering a similar approach for Uwezo village meetings. In the case of a particular community, the specific advocacy actions would be aimed at changes in policy and practice (at local level) to improve children's learning conditions and ultimately their learning outcomes. The promotion of a facilitated advocacy approach is also in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda to "leave no one behind", to foster dialogue in which all parties collaborate in a spirit of equality, to listen and act on the freely-expressed concerns of people affected by policy decisions, and to build an understanding of people's lives through the power of stories told in their own words.

Training in, Piloting and Evaluating the Approach

Uwezo's Volunteer Workbook already has a description of how to set up and run a village meeting. It appeared, however, that more opportunities could be provided to trainers and volunteers to gain experience with facilitation concepts and methods. Thus, an initiative was undertaken wherein such experience-building was integrated into the training of trainers (ToT) and volunteer training, followed by the piloting and evaluation of the facilitated advocacy approach in two of the assessed districts.

Before the ToT sessions, information about the approach - and specific facilitation techniques - were incorporated into the Uwezo Trainers' Manual, and later into the Volunteer Workbook. At the ToT itself, participants were introduced to and informed about the facilitated advocacy initiative. At the later National Conference, a training session on facilitated advocacy was conducted for a group of 60 trainers and staff. After the Conference, training and monitoring in the approach was collaboratively supported for 60 volunteers in each of two districts, along with one District Coordinator and three Village Coordinators. "New" elements were introduced into the Uwezo assessment process and village meetings, including the introduction of facilitation techniques to:
" Enable equitable participation (through inclusion of facilitation tips in the Trainers' Manual and Volunteer Workbook, and reviewing these in both training sessions)
" Share perspectives on children's learning (by generating ideas for practice - with the trainers - on how to involve children, compiling these and sharing them with trainers and trainees, and encouraging the volunteers to try them out), and
" Build consensus towards actionable advocacy commitments that enjoy the collective ownership of all village meeting participants (by discussing how this might be done in both training sessions, and providing examples of such collective actions).

In each of the two pilot districts of Adjumani and Arua, three pairs of volunteers were identified by the trainers over the course of the training, at the end of which the new elements were discussed. During the assessment monitoring, where possible each pair was joined at a school, at least one household and during the village meeting. Reflection-learning meetings at the end of the two pilot assessment weeks provided action-based insights into how the introduction of the facilitation techniques eventuated.

As implied above, to evaluate the pilot experience, an "action research / learning" model was used, centered around a "most significant change" tool (another "new" element), the basis of which is a simple statement: Describe what you think was the most significant change that you contributed to in some way during the assessment process and/or village meeting. On-going, cumulative dialogue and documentation took place throughout the pilot in the two districts. Significant change stories collected from the volunteers offered a glimpse into how they perceived the experience. The documentation and stories constitute the data for the action research.

Implications for Uwezo and Other Organizations

For a facilitated advocacy approach to be integrated into Uwezo's processes, a number of factors will need to be explored further, including:
" The role of advocacy in the organization's work, and how the "messages" that come out of the assessment are being translated into efforts to influence district- and national-level education policy and practice.
" How to implement a training model that supports the "passing along" of facilitation concepts and techniques from national trainers to volunteer trainees, and
" The expectations placed on village-member volunteer-facilitators to take on board awareness of the nature of a facilitated advocacy approach's participatory elements.
Broader implications for the role of facilitated advocacy in education will also be suggested.

Authors

• Mary Goretti Nakabugo, Twaweza East Africa

• William E Savage, Independent